You probably don’t know Connor Taras, and in that, you are not alone. In a way, until two or three years ago, this would mean you had something in common with almost everyone in Connor Taras’s life. They might have guessed who he really was, of course. But there was no way to be sure.

Connor Taras is a few things. He’s 25, a native of Waverley, N.S., and a kayaker. He won a world junior silver medal and made the national team at 16, challenged for the 2008 Olympics at 19, just missed the 2012 Olympics, and hopes to make Rio 2016.

And he’s gay. Took him a long time to say it, though.

“I really shut off my feelings, and you know, I think I always knew it, but I always tried to hide it,” says Taras. “Not accepting it is waking up every day and trying to hide from the people you’re living around.”

This is the first time he’s said it publicly, and in the age of Michael Sam and Jason Collins, this is less and less of a remarkable story anymore. Except every story is remarkable, to someone.

For years, Connor tried to convince himself that it was just a phase; he never spoke about it with anybody. He got into high-performance kayak, a world which, as he says, “you do one thing and everybody finds out. There are no secrets.” It was also, as star paddler Adam van Koeverden puts it, a pretty macho place.

But Connor kept the secret. He tried to dress the way he figured straight guys dressed. He tried to like the music he figured straight guys liked. He ignored homophobic language from friends. He would drink when the group drank, but he’d be calculating the whole time. He would be the life of the party; he would, in his words, “zing around the room like a pinball.” They named a drink after him, an awful-sounding drink, red wine and Red Bull.

And the end of the night always loomed, because it’s at the end of the night that the boys and the girls find one another, if they’re interested, and he wanted it to look like he was interested. But it was terrifying, because it was a place he could get found out. So he’d drink a little too much, get a little sloppy, screw it up, rig the game. The girl would always drift away. He’d live with the hangover.

“There was a fine line with that,” says Taras. “When you get to that point in those nights, you also make decisions that you’d regret the next day. So I’d always have to be very careful not to out myself with a stupid mistake.”

The whole time, he was trying to find himself as an athlete, too. He won his junior world championship medal in the K-500, but the distance was eliminated. So Connor switched to the K-1000, then to the 200, shaped and reshaped his body, left his old coach and couldn’t stick with a new one. He fought for funding. He tried for 2012, but was 0.6 seconds away in a two-man K-200m race. After everything, after all the hiding, he had nothing to show for it.

“I just started feeling sorry for myself,” Connor says. “And I started thinking about those feelings. I thought, why can’t I do this, and why is this me?”

He was depressed. His confidence was in shreds. He stopped training for two months. He thought about quitting, about how much effort would be needed to try again. He thought about his mistakes. He regretted all the energy wasted on hiding.

And one night in 2013 he lay in bed and said, well, this is me. Might as well own it. He didn’t say gay, because he’d come to think of the word as an insult, as a slur. “I never liked saying that word at first, because . . . to me, it had a different meaning,” Connor says.

When he finally told his best friend, Caitlyn Dunphy, they were at a party and he didn’t tell her he was gay — he fumbled around, and ended with “I like guys.” And she was so happy for him. He thought, “I’m going to feel like s--t in the morning.”

He didn’t. He felt liberated. He told family, friends. Nobody recoiled. His mom took a little time, because she’d always imagined a specific happiness for him, but happiness is what he’d found, and she got there. “Within four days,” he says now, “bam, I was out.” He didn’t say he was gay, once. He can say it now. “The word is back to meaning what it’s supposed to mean,” he says.

And his kayaking got better. The training for the 1000 was coming into place, and he was happy, really happy. His personal best was a 3:51; this year it’s a 3:39.

“It just felt like I had so much pressure off my shoulders,” says Connor. “It felt so great. I just didn’t care about what people thought of me anymore. It was the first time I went to race and was actually there for myself. Before, I was there for the person I was trying to pretend to be. I got to be me.”

He is the first Canadian amateur athlete to publicly come out since the Canadian Olympic Committee partnered last month with You Can Play, which fights homophobia in sports, to march in the World Pride Parade in Toronto. There were 23 out athletes in London, and only three men, two in dressage. John Fennell, the Canadian luger who represented Canada in Sochi and who came out in May of this year, told Taras, “There’s more of us out there than you think.”

You’ve never heard of Connor Taras. He may never be a star, and isn’t guaranteed to be an Olympian. His decision to come out publicly may not matter to you. He is one story, one thread.

But to Connor Taras that thread is everything, and that’s the point. It’s one more person who has decided not to hide, one more battle won. He gets to be him.

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